head to shield her from the sun. In the church twelve choirs sang for us, but she couldn’t even raise a smile. I don’t think she smiled once all day. Then it got worse.’
‘Worse?’
He nodded gloomily. ‘I was so undermined by her hostile attitude but at the same time so in awe of her that I often couldn’t bring myself to sleep with her. Beauty can be terrifying, don’t you think?’
‘Sometimes it leaves you powerless.’
‘Exactly. And even if I did manage to sleep with her, I would return to my bed as soon as it was over. I was so upset by the whole thing. Sick with nerves. Redi advised me to limit the number of my visits to her bedchamber, but there was such pressure on me to produce an heir.’ He let out a short, bitter laugh. ‘I spent so little time with her that people began to suspect I was homosexual. Me!’ The steam thinned, and I noted the look of horror on his face, his eyes bulging, his mouth agape. ‘Me,’ he said again, ‘when it is I who have decreed that sodomites should be decapitated.’
Ah, I said to myself, but that was later.
‘The more reticent I was,’ he went on, ‘the more antagonistic she became. She would insult me, right in front of her servants. They thought it was amusing. They were all French, of course. They used to help her move from one bedchamber to another, so I wouldn’t be able to find her. Sometimes I would walk the corridors for hours – in my nightshirt! It’s a wonder I didn’t catch my death.’ He sighed, then reached for a glass and drank. ‘You know what her servants did? They set traps so she would know when I was coming. Bells on door handles, chamber pots in the middle of corridors. That sort of thing. For a while she had a dog. Some fancy French breed. Infuriating creature. It would start yapping whenever it heard my footsteps or my voice. Once, her servants rigged up a trip-wire outside her bedchamber and I fell and almost broke my collarbone …’
‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘but it’s a miracle she got pregnant at all.’
‘There were nights when she relented. I never understood what prompted her sudden changes of heart, and I could never ask. If I raised the subject, she would tell me not to be so vulgar, so distasteful – what was I, a peasant? – and that would lead to an impassioned diatribe about Florence, what a backwater it was, and how her life had become a purgatory, if not a hell, and she would finish off with a sarcastic, disparaging reference to Dante, just to show how well-educated and civilized she was.’
‘And you still loved her …’
He lay back in his bath and stared at the ceiling for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. ‘You should have seen her, Zummo,’ he said at last. ‘She was exquisite, even when she was angry. Especially when she was angry. Dark eyes, auburn hair. Wonderfully delicate features. And she could be so charming, if it suited her. But always, in the end, this look of mingled boredom and disgust would appear on her face, and then the fighting would begin again, and she would start to scream at me: our marriage was a travesty, she was no better than a concubine, and all our children were bastards. Her screaming could be heard throughout the palace, and I would have to send her to Lappeggi or Poggio a Caiano, along with her entire, enormous retinue of servants.’ He peered at me across his chest. ‘I became the symbol of everything she hated.’
I asked him how he dealt with that.
‘I prayed,’ he said. ‘She hated that too. She mocked my piety. She would drop to her knees and put her hands together and lift her eyes heavenward and start talking a lot of mumbo-jumbo – or perhaps it was French that she was talking …’
He laughed quietly, and I laughed with him, but then a silence fell between us. Some minutes passed. Eventually, I heard a snort, and then a rumble. He had fallen asleep, his half-open mouth perilously close to the surface of the water. I went and alerted Schwarz.
Later, outside the Grand Duke’s apartment, I stood by a window that gave on to the courtyard at the back of the palace. The eastern sky was the colour of charcoal, daybreak